Energy spending's bipartisan appeal

It’s easy for deficit hawks to campaign on a pledge of chopping up Washington’s credit card. It’s much harder, once in Congress, to turn away influential local businesses looking for federal help.

Take Rand Paul, for example.

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The Kentucky Republican rode into the Senate last year as a libertarian standard-bearer, promising to shrink the government’s reach and spending power. But as a senator, he has championed the cause of USEC, a company that runs a uranium enrichment plant in Paducah that threatens to close in May, wiping out 1,200 jobs.

So along with fellow GOP lawmakers from Kentucky — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Ed Whitfield — Paul has spent much of the past year pressuring the Obama administration to extend new uranium re-enrichment contracts to help keep the plant afloat. Paul’s tactics have included blocking nominations of five Energy Department appointees, one of whom remains in limbo.

Skeptics have expressed doubts about whether a new enrichment contract would allow the plant to operate profitably — it also needs a new power agreement once its current deal with the Tennessee Valley Authority expires — and say it would commit taxpayer dollars in the short term. Still, Paul made his pitch for the enrichment work to Energy Secretary Steven Chu during a February committee hearing.

“As you know, I’m not a big fan of expending new taxpayer dollars, but the taxpayer dollars here come out of the sales of the uranium,” he told Chu. “This isn’t $500 million or billions of dollars being spent on something where we might get jobs. These are 1,200 existing jobs in a long-standing nuclear trade. … I think it is something where the government could do something that costs no money and hope you’ll just help us there.”

Paul has plenty of company — even among other self-avowed deficit hawks — in coming to the rescue of constituents in need of federal largesse.

The same issue arises when lawmakers champion home-state energy industries such as wind, natural gas, biofuels or nuclear — even while denouncing pork for other industries.

“It happens all the time,” said Daniel Holler, communications director for Heritage Action for America, who noted widespread support for House and Senate legislation that would provide federal support for natural gas vehicles. “You have all these people who promised to end wind or ethanol subsidies and then turned around to vote for a tax credit for natural gas vehicles.”

Such lawmakers are unlikely to pay a political price for hypocrisy, as it’s a mind-set they share with many of their constituents. Even the most fiscally conservative voters are more sympathetic to federal spending when it lands where they live.

That’s a reality the Obama administration faced while defending the Energy Department following the collapse of Solyndra, a solar manufacturer that folded despite getting $535 million in federal loan guarantees.